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Showing 1-9 of 640 booksGods of Want
K-Ming Chang
Startling stories that center the bodies, memories, myths, and relationships of Asian American women, in the vein of the electrifying relationships in Killing Eve and Yellowjackets—from the National Book Award “5 Under 35” honoree and author of Bestiary “Wise, energetic, funny, and wild, Gods of Want displays a boundless imagination anchored by the weight of ancestors and history.”—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina and Woman of Light In “Auntland,” a steady stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking surreptitious kisses from women at temple, buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prepare for citizenship tests, and hatching plans to name their daughters “Dog.” In “The Chorus of Dead Cousins,” ghost-cousins cross space, seas, and skies to haunt their live-cousin, wife to a storm chaser. In “Xífù,” a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to rid the house of her. In “Mariela,” two girls explore one another’s bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark, while in “Virginia Slims,” a woman from a cigarette ad comes to life. And in “Resident Aliens,” a former slaughterhouse serves as a residence to a series of widows, each harboring her own calamitous secrets. With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.
Reading the Waves
Lidia Yuknavitch
The frank and revealing memoir of a writer who draws from her own creativity to heal. "I believe our bodies are carriers of experience," Lidia Yuknavitch writes in her provocative memoir Reading the Waves. "I mean to ask if there is a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions." Drawing on her background—her father's abuse, her complicated dynamic with her disabled mother, the death of her child, her sexual relationships with men and women—and her creative life as an author and teacher, Yuknavitch has come to understand that by using the power of literature and storytelling to reframe her memories, she can loosen the bonds that have enslaved her emotional growth. Armed with this insight, she allows herself to look with the eye of an artist at the wounds she suffered and come to understand the transformational power this has to restore her soul. By turns candid and lyrical, stoic and forgiving, blunt and evocative, Reading the Waves reframes memory to show how crucial this process can be to gaining a deeper understanding of ourselves.
The Conservative Heartland
Jon K. Lauck - editor, Catherine McNicol Stock - editor
In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, there was widespread shock that the Midwest, the Democrats' so-called blue wall, had been so effectively breached by Donald Trump. But the blue wall, as The Conservative Heartland makes clear, was never quite as secure as so many observers assumed. Focusing on nine states, from Iowa and the Dakotas to Indiana and Ohio, the essays in this collection detail the rise of Midwestern conservatism after World War II - a trend that coincided with the transformation of the prewar Republican Party into the New Right. This transformation, the authors contend, involved the Midwest and the Sunbelt states. Through the lenses of race, class, gender, and sexuality, their essays explore the development of Midwestern conservative politics in light of deindustrialization, environmentalism, second-wave feminism, mass incarceration, privatization, and debates over same-sex marriage and abortion, among other issues. Together these essays map the region's complex patchwork of viable rural and urban areas, variously subject to a wide array of conflicting interests and concerns; the perspective they provide, at once broad and in-depth, offers unique historical insight into the Midwest's political complexity - and its status as the last real competitive battleground in presidential elections.
Magic and Loss
Virginia Heffernan
Just as Susan Sontag did for photography and Marshall McLuhan did for television, Virginia Heffernan (called one of the "best living writers of English prose") reveals the logic and aesthetics behind the Internet. Since its inception, the Internet has morphed from merely an extension of traditional media into its own full-fledged civilization. It is among mankind's great masterpieces - a massive work of art. As an idea, it rivals monotheism. We all inhabit this fascinating place. But its deep logic, its cultural potential, and its societal impact often elude us. In this deep and thoughtful book, Virginia Heffernan presents an original and far-reaching analysis of what the Internet is and does. Life online, in the highly visual, social, portable, and global incarnation, rewards certain virtues. The new medium favors speed, accuracy, wit, prolificacy, and versatility, and its form and functions are changing how we perceive, experience, and understand the world.
Measure What Matters
John Doerr
Brought to you by Penguin. Instant New York Times best seller. The revolutionary movement behind the explosive growth of Intel, Google, Amazon and Uber. With a foreword by Larry Page and contributions from Bono and Bill Gates. Measure What Matters is about using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a revolutionary approach to goal-setting, to make tough choices in business. In 1999, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr invested nearly $12 million in a startup that had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. Doerr introduced the founders to OKRs and with them at the foundation of their management, the startup grew from 40 employees to more than 70,000 with a market cap exceeding $600 billion. The startup was Google. Since then Doerr has introduced OKRs to more than 50 companies, helping tech giants and charities exceed all expectations. In the OKR model objectives define what we seek to achieve and key results are how those top priority goals will be attained. OKRs focus effort, foster coordination and enhance workplace satisfaction. They surface an organisation's most important work as everyone's goals from entry-level to CEO are transparent to the entire institution. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organisations. This audiobook will show you how to collect timely, relevant data to track progress - to measure what matters. It will help any organisation or team aim high, move fast, and excel.
The Last Love Song
Tracy Daugherty
In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first biography published about her life. Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction. Some of her most notable work includes Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Run River, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award winner shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. Daugherty takes listeners on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento through to her adult life as a writer. Daugherty interviews those who know and knew her personally while maintaining a respectful distance from the reclusive literary great. The Last Love Song reads like fiction; lifelong fans and listeners learning about Didion for the first time will be enthralled with this impressive tribute.
The Fire Is upon Us
Nicholas Buccola
How the clash between the civil rights firebrand and the father of modern conservatism continues to illuminate America's racial divide On February 18, 1965, an overflowing crowd packed the Cambridge Union in Cambridge, England, to witness a historic televised debate between James Baldwin, the leading literary voice of the civil rights movement, and William F. Buckley Jr., a fierce critic of the movement and America's most influential conservative intellectual. The topic was "the American dream is at the expense of the American Negro", and no one who has seen the debate can soon forget it. Nicholas Buccola's The Fire Is upon Us is the first book to tell the full story of the event, the radically different paths that led Baldwin and Buckley to it, the controversies that followed, and how the debate and the decades-long clash between the men continues to illuminate America's racial divide today. Born in New York City only 15 months apart, the Harlem-raised Baldwin and the privileged Buckley could not have been more different, but they both rose to the height of American intellectual life during the civil rights movement. By the time they met in Cambridge, Buckley was determined to sound the alarm about a man he considered an "eloquent menace." For his part, Baldwin viewed Buckley as a deluded reactionary whose popularity revealed the sickness of the American soul. The stage was set for an epic confrontation that pitted Baldwin's call for a moral revolution in race relations against Buckley's unabashed elitism and implicit commitment to white supremacy. A remarkable story of race and the American dream, The Fire Is upon Us reveals the deep roots and lasting legacy of a conflict that continues to haunt our politics.
All the Water in the World
Eiren Caffall
In the tradition of Station Eleven, a literary thriller set partly on the roof of New York’s Museum of Natural History in a flooded future. "Captivating...The setting, the detailed emotive descriptions, and nail-biting adventure are incandescent."—Library Journal (starred) All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved. Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most–love and work, community and knowledge–will survive. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.
The Black Box
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“Henry Louis Gates is a national treasure. Here, he returns with an intellectual and at times deeply personal meditation on the hard-fought evolution and the very meaning of African American identity, calling upon our country to transcend its manufactured divisions.” — Isabel Wilkerson, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste“This is a literary history of Black America, but it is also an argument that African American history is inextricable from the history of African American literature.” —The New York TimesA magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country’s history.Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in America through the prism of the writers who have led the way. From Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, to Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison—these writers used words to create a livable world—a "home" —for Black people destined to live out their lives in a bitterly racist society.It is a book grounded in the beautiful irony that a community formed legally and conceptually by its oppressors to justify brutal sub-human bondage, transformed itself through the word into a community whose foundational definition was based on overcoming one of history’s most pernicious lies. This collective act of resistance and transcendence is at the heart of its self-definition as a "community." Out of that contested ground has flowered a resilient, creative, powerful, diverse culture formed by people who have often disagreed markedly about what it means to be "Black," and about how best to shape a usable past out of the materials at hand to call into being a more just and equitable future. This is the epic story of how, through essays and speeches, novels, plays, and poems, a long line of creative thinkers has unveiled the contours of—and resisted confinement in—the "black box" inside which this "nation within a nation" has been assigned, willy nilly, from the nation’s founding through to today. This is a book that records the compelling saga of the creation of a people.
Delight
J. B. Priestley
‘An exquisitely-written, generous, funny, thoughtful book about the everyday joys of being alive. I love it.’ Dolly Alderton ‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench ‘My apology, my little bit of penitence, for having grumbled so much, for having darkened the breakfast table, almost ruined the lunch, nearly silence the dinner party, for all the fretting and chafing, grousing and croaking, for the old glum look and the thrust-out lower lip. So my long-suffering kinsfolk, my patient friends, may a glimmer of that delight which has so often possessed me, but perhaps too frequently in secret, now reach you from these pages.’ There are times when there doesn’t seem much to smile about. And for those times, there is this book. J. B Priestley’s 1949 classic teaches us that joy may be found in even the simplest things, and that we all have the capacity to appreciate them. Delight comprises a series of short essays, all focussing on a single simple pleasure, from reading detective stories in bed to smoking a pipe in the bath; from ‘Cosy planning’ to the earliest summer mornings; and from mineral water in the bedrooms of foreign hotels to the smell of bacon in the morning. Combining poignant memories of his childhood with glimpses of his interior world, panoramas of life abroad with thoughts about writing, music, theatre – some strictly personal, some universal –this highly readable book bursts with humour and literary flare on every page.
The Saddest Words
Michael Gorra; Joe Barrett
"How do we read William Faulkner in the 21st century?" asks Michael Gorra, one of America's most preeminent literary critics. Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of Black characters and Black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.
Earthly Bodies
Vanessa Chakour
Examining the cultural belief that our animal instincts are to be corrected or corralled, nature advocate and rewilding facilitator Vanessa Chakour explores our inner and outer landscapes through the lens of wild animals. How can wolves, misunderstood in myths but vital to ecosystems, teach us to rewrite dangerous stories and respect nature’s wisdom? How do the peaceful coexistence strategies of black bears offer insights into sharing resources? How can the engineering feats of beavers guide us in fostering regenerative building solutions and vibrant ecosystems? What can the loyal partnership of seahorses teach us about nurturing and love? In Earthly Bodies, Vanessa draws parallels from struggles she has weathered in her own life to those endured by twenty-three wild animals—from wolves to sea lions—exploring our unease of feeling like prey; challenging the entrapment of our limiting beliefs; contextualizing the turmoil of fractured landscapes; and affirming our primal ache to belong. Vanessa’s pivotal encounters with creatures in sync with their primal rhythms and demands illustrate the necessity of relying on the intelligence of gut instinct; of the magnetic pull of attraction; of the body’s mandate for restorative rest; and of the sacred bonds of love. We often cut ourselves off from identifying with wild animals—like wolves, foxes, bats and bears, and other animal relatives—out of fear, ignorance, disgust, or misunderstanding, yet our earthly human bodies can lead us in our pursuits of pleasure, love, wonder, healing, and connection. With each section containing an aspect of injured animal’s return home to their natural habitat, and—in our case—to an embodied, instinctual self, Earthly Bodies meditates on how this journey from enclosures, to rehabilitation, to soft release, and finally to homing raises questions about our humanity. In so learning, we understand how we might benefit from embracing our own animal nature to gain deeper self-actualization, find common ground with our fellow animals, and learn to thrive together.
All the Lives We Ever Lived
Katharine Smyth
A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives - and see clearly the people we love most. "Transcendent." (The Washington Post) • "You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work." (The Wall Street Journal) Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Town & Country Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favorite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Smyth’s story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf’s Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss, and homecoming. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, and her artful adaptation of its groundbreaking structure, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel - and crafts an elegant reminder of literature’s ability to clarify and console. Braiding memoir, literary criticism, and biography, All the Lives We Ever Lived is a wholly original debut: a love letter from a daughter to her father, and from a reader to her most cherished author. Praise for All the Lives We Ever Lived "This searching memoir pays homage to To the Lighthouse, while recounting the author’s fraught relationship with her beloved father, a vibrant figure afflicted with alcoholism and cancer.... Smyth’s writing is evocative and incisive." (The New Yorker) "Like H Is for Hawk, Smyth’s book is a memoir that’s not quite a memoir, using Woolf, and her obsession with Woolf, as a springboard to tell the story of her father’s vivid life and sad demise due to alcoholism and cancer.... An experiment in twenty-first century introspection that feels rooted in a modernist tradition and bracingly fresh." (Vogue) "Deeply moving - part memoir, part literary criticism, part outpouring of longing and grief.... This is a beautiful book about the wildness of mortal life, and the tenuous consolations of art." (The Times Literary Supplement) "Blending analysis of a deeply literary novel with a personal story...gently entwining observations from Woolf's classic with her own layered experience. Smyth tells us of her love for her father, his profound alcoholism and the unpredictable course of the cancer that ultimately claimed his life." (Time)
Hollywood's Eve
Lili Anolik
From one of Vanity Fair’s rising stars comes a brilliant, star-studded portrait of the glamorous and brazen Hollywood artist, muse, and writer Eve Babitz. Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural capital of the world - a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA. The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few. She was a sun-kissed Edie Sedgwick. Then, at nearly 30, her "It girl" days numbered, Babitz was discovered - as a writer - by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. And yet, during her career, Babitz was under-known and under-read. She’s since experienced a breakthrough, and is now, 20 years after her last published work, on the cusp of literary stardom, and recognition as a - as the - essential LA writer. For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the '90s turned her into a recluse, living in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik’s elegant and provocative new audiobook is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject: artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist Eve Babitz.
Slow Days, Fast Company
Eve Babitz
Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of LA in the 1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her firsthand experiences in the LA cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time.
The Mirror of My Heart
Dick Davis
An anthology of verse by women poets writing in Persian, most of whom have never been translated into English before, from acclaimed scholar and translator Dick Davis. The Mirror of My Heart is a unique and captivating collection of 83 Persian women poets, many of whom wrote anonymously or were punished for their outspokenness. One of the very first Persian poets was a woman (Rabe'eh, who lived more than 1,000 years ago), and there have been women poets writing in Persian in virtually every generation since that time until the present. Before the 20th century, they tended to come from society's social extremes - many were princesses, some were entertainers, but many were wives and daughters who wrote simply for their own entertainment, and they were active in many different countries - Iran, India, Afghanistan, and areas of Central Asia that are now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. From Rabe'eh in the 10th century to Fatemeh Ekhtesari in the 21st, the women poets found in The Mirror of My Heart write across the millennium on such universal topics as marriage, children, political climate, death, and emancipation, recreating life from hundreds of years ago that is strikingly similar to our own today and giving insight into their experiences as women throughout different points of Persian history. The volume is introduced and translated by Dick Davis, a scholar and translator of Persian literature as well as a gifted poet in his own right. This audiobook includes a PDF that contains notes from the book. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
Metamorphoses
Karolina Watroba
In 2024, exactly one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, customers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books filled with mysterious courts and monstrous insects. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself. Metamorphoses presents a non-chronological journey through Kafka's life, combining literary scholarship with the responses of his audiences throughout the last century. It is a both an exploration of Kafka's life and an exciting new way of approaching literary history.
Her Lotus Year
Paul French
New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor—her one year in China. Before she was the Duchess of Windsor, Bessie Wallis Warfield was Mrs. Wallis Spencer, wife of Earl “Win” Spencer, a US Navy aviator. From humble beginnings in Baltimore, she rose to marry a man who gave up his throne for her. But what made Wallis Spencer, Navy Wife, the woman who could become the Duchess of Windsor? The answers lie in her one-year sojourn in China. In her memoirs, Wallis described her time in China as her “Lotus Year,” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, a group living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. Though faced with challenges, Wallis came to appreciate traditional Chinese aesthetics. China molded her in terms of her style and provided her with friendships that lasted a lifetime. But that “Lotus Year” would also later be used to damn her in the eyes of the British Establishment. The British government’s supposed “China Dossier” of Wallis’s rumored amorous and immoral activities in the Far East was a damning concoction, portraying her as sordid, debauched, influenced by foreign agents, and unfit to marry a king. Instead, French, an award-winning China historian, reveals Wallis Warfield Spencer as a woman of tremendous courage who may have acted as a courier for the US government, undertaking dangerous undercover diplomatic missions in a China torn by civil war. Her Lotus Year is an untold story in the colorful life of a woman too often maligned by history. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld
Paul Kidby
A brilliant fully illustrated biography that brings Terry Pratchett’s universally beloved Discworld to life as never before and pays tribute to an enduring creative collaboration. “It's still magic, even if you know how it's done.”–Sir Terry Pratchett Designing Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is a celebration of Discworld art and a brilliant homage to the decades-long collaboration between artist Paul Kidby and Sir Terry Pratchett that takes listeners behind the scenes of one of the great creative partnerships. It shows how the Discworld was brought to visual life—from the earliest sketches to the final magnificent masterpieces—and how Pratchett and Kidby were influenced by art and pop culture, fusing them into the Discworld universe. While Pratchett was the undisputed creative fountainhead, for three decades Kidby has been the artistic force taking the people, places, and pieces of man-eating luggage from Terry's ever-fertile imagination right into our world. Packed with never-before-seen art and the stories behind it, it is a must-have for Pratchett fans of all ages. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
American Bulk
Emily Mester
What if we explored our relationship to consumption with the same depth and feeling we use to tell stories of great loves and losses? Americans are caught up in bulk. We guiltily watch Amazon boxes pile up on the porch, wade through endless reviews to find the perfect product, and crave the comforting indulgence of a chain restaurant. In American Bulk, Emily Mester intertwines cultural critique and personal history to explore how the things we buy, eat, amass, and discard become an intimate part of our lives. With humor and sharp intellect, she reflects on the joys and anxieties of family Costco trips, how a seasonal stint at Ulta Beauty taught her the insidious art of the sale, and what it means to get Mall Sad. In a nuanced examination of diet culture and fatness, Mester recounts her teenage summer at fat camp and the unexpected liberation she finds there. Finally, she ventures to Storm Lake, Iowa, to reckon with her grandmother's abandoned hoard, excavating the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her family's obsession with stuff. American Bulk introduces listeners to a striking new literary talent from the American heartland, one who dares to ask us to regard consumption not with guilt but with grace and empathy.
The Great Library of Tomorrow
Rosalia Aguilar Solace
AFTERWORD BY DJ STEVE AOKI Fueled by the same collaborative heart and boundless imagination that dazzle millions of devoted Tomorrowland followers and festivalgoers every year, The Great Library of Tomorrow is a stunningly original epic fantasy about a band of heroes who must defeat a malevolent enemy bent on destroying the openness, love, and creativity that sustain their many realms. Helia has served as the Sage of Hope for the Great Library of Tomorrow for centuries. She is one of the chosen few who embody and protect the values of humanity across the numerous realms of Paperworld, which are connected within the Library itself via magical portals controlled by the Book of Wisdom. But even her hope is tested when she and her partner, Xavier, the Sage of Truth, are attacked while visiting the famous Rose Garden in the realm of Silvyra. Wounded and in shock amid a storm of fire, they are confronted by a deadly figure known to them as the Ash Man. With the Garden destroyed and its dragon protector missing, Xavier sacrifices his life so that Helia can return home to warn the other Sages. But there she finds the Book of Wisdom—always a guide to the Sages—eerily silent. With the Ash Man gaining strength, Helia soon finds herself in a race against time, searching for clues to the origins of their foe—and any possible way to defeat him.
Love, Sexuality, and Matriarchy
Danny Campbell
"[A] fascinating collection of essays" on the complicated relations between men and women from the New York Times-bestselling author of The Art of Loving (The New York Times Book Review). The renowned social psychologist delves deep into the fraught relationship between genders, drawing upon the influential insights of Bachofen, Freud, Marx, and Briffault. Not primarily interested in the existence of anatomical and biological differences between the sexes, Fromm instead analyzes how these differences have been made use of throughout human history. Drawing from Bachofen's Mother Right, Fromm expounds on how matriarchal and patriarchal social structures determine relations between the sexes in essential ways, and how they are shaped by the dominant orientation of the social character at any given time. He posits that the most important question concerning gender relations is which characterological orientation determines human relationships: love or hate, love of life or fascination with force. Thus, it will not be gender conflict that will determine humanity's future but whether we opt for love of life or love of death.
The Essential Fromm
Jim Seybert
Essays on human alienation, mode of existence, consumerism, narcissism, and more from "both a psychologist of penetration and a writer of ability" (Chicago Tribune). As Erich Fromm points out, ours is "a life between having and being"—between mere having and healthy being, between destructiveness and creativity, between narcissism and productive self-understanding, between passivity and the joy of positive activity. The alternatives of having and being are basic orientations of our character and determine our behavior. The mostly unpublished and unknown texts featured in The Essential Fromm encapsulate the psychologist's views on the fulfilling life. To put down roots yet remain free is what the late Erich Fromm called the art of being. It is the secret of happiness.
There Is Simply too Much to Think About
Saul Bellow
A sweeping collection and a tribute to one of the most influential, daring, and visionary minds of the 20th century. The year 2015 marks several literary milestones: the centennial of Saul Bellow's birth, the tenth anniversary of his death, and the publication of Zachary Leader's much anticipated biography. Bellow - a Nobel laureate, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the only novelist to receive three National Book Awards - has long been regarded as one of America's most cherished authors. Here, Benjamin Taylor, editor of the acclaimed Saul Bellow: Letters, presents lesser-known aspects of the iconic writer. Arranged chronologically, this literary time capsule displays the full extent of Bellow's nonfiction, including criticism, interviews, speeches, and other reflections, tracing his career from his initial success as a novelist until the end of his life. Bringing together six classic pieces with an abundance of previously uncollected material, There Is Simply Too Much to Think Aboutis a powerful reminder not only of Bellow's genius but also of his enduring place in the Western canon, and it is sure to be widely reviewed and talked about for years to come.
A Legend of the Future
Agustin de Rojas, Nick Caistor - translator
The first book translated into English by the patron saint of Cuban science fiction: a canonical, riveting parable in the vein of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey about the intense pressures of life inside Communist Cuba. This mesmerizing novel, reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is a science fiction survival story that captures the intense pressures - economic, ideological, psychological - inside Communist Cuba. A Legend of the Future by Agustín de Rojas, the father of Cuban science fiction, takes place inside a spaceship on a mission to Titan, one of Saturn's moons, while back on Earth, warring super powers threaten the fate of humanity. When the ship malfunctions on the return journey, the crewmembers must face their innermost fears amidst experiments in psychological and emotional conditioning and aliens that may or may not be real.